Mysterious Island

Minding Nemo

Mysterious Island
UK 1961
Directed by Cy Endfield
Columbia/Impact Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: All the mysterious spoilers on this one.

So Mysterious Island is based on the novel of a similar name... my favourite of Jules Verne’s novels, The Mysterious Island. I first heard of it by reading a Marvel Classics comic when I was a youngster and was fascinated by it, especially the twist towards the end. It was long before I caught up with this version on television (I guess I would have watched it in on a black and white set in the 1970s) and I like to revisit this movie in particular every now and again for a few reasons. One is that it’s easily the most entertaining production of this ‘adaptation’. Two is that it’s got an absolutely fantastic, somewhat blistering, driven score by Bernard Herrmann and thirdly, because the last adaptation of this I saw, as a Columbia serial, also heavily featured the queen of an alien race and her cohorts wearing left over costumes from serials like Flash Gordon (reviewed here) and Buck Rogers (reviewed here), chasing the various protagonists around said island for a lot of the running time and, frankly, that’s about as far from the book as you could get.

That being said, this is in many ways just as bad in terms of taking huge liberties with the original text and, truth be told, I’ve never myself seen a straight version of this done properly. The obvious differences here being: Well, there are no women in the book that I can recall but, in this one, two female characters are inexplicably washed up on the beach to join the main characters in a random shipwreck. This seems to happen a lot with adaptations of Jules Verne’s works, I’ve noticed, since they rarely have any major female characters and, for some reason, movie studios insist on putting them in anyway. So they completely screw themselves in the ‘accurate adaptation’ department before they’ve even started. Secondly... there’s no pet dog in this and the four legged character is sorely missed, in my opinion. 

Thirdly, well... it’s a Schneer and Harryhausen production and Ray needs something to animate so, the ‘mysterious’ benefactor of the island (I’ll get to him in a minute) is working on solving mankind’s hunger problems by having figured out how to make crops and animals grow to huge size (the science here is not elabourated on). So we have a giant crab, giant turkey-like bird, giant bee and giant octopus for some of the characters to fight here. Interestingly for a film utilising the genius of Ray Harryhausen, the crab used is a real crab, gutted and with armatures fitted inside it, rather than a rubber model. 

Okay, so the film starts off strongly with Herrmann’s powerful score crashing in over the Columbia logo before his music gets full on broody as the various credits rise against a moving backdrop of the sea (and you can hear it behind the music too), the various shots of the sea tinted yellow, then purple, then blue and then back to yellow again... constantly cycling between various colours as the credits are raised. And it’s during these credits that we have the films first big clunker of a mistake. A total spoiler... I’ll get back to it in a second.

The plot is about five prisoners (actually, four union army prisoners and one confederate captor) escaping gaol during the siege of Richmond, Virginia in 1865. They take a hot air balloon but circumstances are such that they wash up on a deserted island and have to survive. Strange things... no, mysterious things... happen to them. The captain is washed up separately and unconscious but a fire has been lit where he can be found by the others. Some vine creepers are left by the entrance to two caves in a cliff wall, allowing access. The giant turkey thing is shot from afar, saving the lives of some of the crew. A chest of useful implements such as rifles, ammunition, a compass, charts, a sextant, tools, pots n’ pans, a telescope and a copy of Robinson Crusoe conveniently washes up on shore at a convenient point. And a pirate ship which places the lives of the escaped survivors in peril is mysteriously blown up from beneath with an explosive charge. The whole mystery of the original book comes from trying to figure out who the survivors’ mysterious benefactor is. And it’s wonderful... at least in the book.

But let’s go back to those opening credits because, this is where things get silly. There’s a huge spoiler in them because, instead of just listing Herbert Lom as being among the cast, the studio decide to list the credit thusly: “Herbert Lom as Captain Nemo”. Yeah, so that blows, right out of the water, the mystery of the helping hand being Captain Nemo and the surviving remnant of the Nautilus submarine from the earlier Jules Verne adventure yarn 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (Columbia wanted James Mason from the 1950s version to play Nemo again here but, alas, that didn’t happen). 

Luckily, Lom, along with all the other principal actors consisting of Michael Craig, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan, Gary Merrill, Beth Logan, Percy Herbert and Dan Jackson... are all brilliant in this and, even though the twist is revealed on that opening credit, the film is hugely watchable and entertaining without being forewarned. Although, just to compound their error, in this version, it’s revealed the rifles in the chest are engraved with the word Nautilus... just in case we forgot the whole “it’s Captain Nemo folks’ vibe of the, well, not so Mysterious now Island. 

There’s still a little suspense left though, as Nemo warns his new companions that the volcano on the island is due to destroy it in two days or less. Can they all work together to find a way off the island before they are burned to a cinder? You can probably guess which characters survive and which one doesn’t, I suspect. 

And that’s me done with Mysterious Island for a while. Always a pleasure to watch this one and, although there’s not a huge amount of Harryhausen’s trademark animation in it, it’s still a greatly entertaining movie, even if they do go out of their way to advertise the twist in both their credits and, preposterously, on the original cinema trailers for the film too. I’m glad that, when I was a lot younger than I am now, Marvel Comics at least didn’t advertise the twist ahead of schedule. Still, if you’re going to see a cinematic version of Mysterious Island, this is certainly among the more fun ones, even if it continues the tradition of being completely inaccurate to the original novel.

Asylum

Taking Over

Asylum
UK 1972 
Directed by Roy Ward Baker
Amicus/Second Sight  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers in this one. 

Asylum is the next movie in my watch of the old Amicus portmanteau horror films. Dating from 1972 this has four main story segments which include, if you go by the end credits of the print itself, Frozen Fear, The Weird Taylor, Lucy Comes To Stay and Mannikins Of Horror. All of these are written by Robert Bloch (although it’s suspected the first segment may have been more than inspired by a Clark Ashton Smith story) and the spelling of the Mannikins of the last story seems wrong. Modern sources tell me the last story is actually Mannequins Of Horror but, looking at the different spelling uses and the slightly different meanings attributed to each spelling, I think it’s much more likely that the fourth story is actually called Manikins Of Horror. This is not to say that no mannequins appear in the movie, as you’ll see as you read further but, specifically in the fourth segment, they seem to be manikins rather than mannequins.

Indeed, the idea of some kind of reanimated figure seems to be predominant in three of the four shorts in this one. The linking material in this one is of a young psychiatrist, played by Robert Powell, who drives to an old manor house acting as an Asylum, seeking a position there. His car ride over the opening credits is scored with a booming version of Mussorgsky’s Night On Bare Mountain. The current assistant, Dr. Rutherford, as played by Patrick Magee, tasks him with finding the identity of the former head of the place, one Dr. Star, who has gone mad and is, we are told, one of the four patients Rutherford wants Powell’s Dr. Martin to interview. If he can pick out from the four personalities just which one is a blind for the former head of the facility, he can have the job. 

So off Martin goes with the orderly, played by Catweazel himself, yup, Geoffrey Bayldon, to listen to the little horror and thriller stories so he can work out which is the real doctor. It’s at this point that I suspect, even before we meet any of the unlikely candidates, that most people will see the obvious twist ending of the piece coming so, yeah, I won’t say anything further but I thought it was pretty self-evident.

So the first segment, Frozen Fear, is told through the recollections of Bonnie, played by Barbara Parkins. She is having an affair with a character played by Richard Todd, who decides to take his wife, played by Sylvia Sims, permanently out of the equation. So he orders a new freezer for the cellar, bashes her in the head and disposes of the body by slicing her up into six segments (head, arms, legs, torso) and, curiously, wrapping each body part up in brown paper and string before disposing of it all in the new freezer. However, when the brown paper head escapes the freezer and starts rolling around on its own... you know something’s up. When Bonnie arrives on the scene, she finds Todd’s body in the freezer, from where one brown paper covered, severed arm has strangled him... and then she is attacked in the cellar by various bits of his wifes scattered body. It’s silly but hugely entertaining and the brown peper covered limbs give an unusual feel to this kind of material, for sure. 

The next segment, The Weird Tailor, is about a tailor played by Barry Morse, who is threatened with being thrown out of his shop for late payment of the rent by his landlord. Then, however, he gets a customer in the form of Peter Cushing, who wants the tailor to make a special suit for him, to the tune of £200. The conditions are that it has to be made of a certain, special material brought by Cushing’s character and the suit must only be worked on between midnight and 5am each day. Now, we know there’s something up with the material when Morse pricks his finger and it magically absorbs his blood but, he continues working on it and, when he delivers it to Cushing, finds that it’s a special suit to bring life back to Cushing’s long dead son. A special spell suit the client has learned to make from an arcane book of black magic which, given writer Robert Bloch’s long standing friendships in his life, is an obvious homage to H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, I’m pretty sure. Cushing has no money, it turns out and, in a struggle, Morse accidentally kills him. He returns home and tells his wife to burn the suit but, instead, she dresses up their store mannequin with it. And, yes, as you’d expect, the store mannequin comes to life and tries to strangle Morse, who is now obviously driven insane. 

The third segment, Lucy Comes To Stay, stars young Charlotte Rampling as Lucy, who has returned home from a ‘special’ hospital and is being more or less imprisoned by her brother in her house as a form of recovery. It’s not long, however, before Lucy’s friend, played by Britt Ekland, comes to spring her from her house and lures away the nurse on an elabourate ruse. Murderous shenanigans ensue but I think most people would have figured out the real identity of Lucy’s friend when she first enters the narrative so, alas, no surprises here.

The fourth and final segment, the incorrectly spelled Mannikins Of Horror, is more a quick prelude and stars Herbert Lom as a former doctor who has made various miniature, robot like manekins of former colleagues and one of himself. This leads directly into the bookends with Dr. Martin who is about to return to London, no longer wanting the job, when the last manekin, made to resemble Lom himself and with his own brain willed inside the tiny brain inside the model*, gets into the office downstairs and stabs Magee’s character dead with a scalpel to the back of the brain. Dr. Martin crushes the manekin, it’s tiny internal organs leaking onto the floor and, this has the effect of also crushing Herbert Lom’s character in the upstairs room. Then the real Dr. Star is revealed, another murder is committed and the film ends as a cycle with another doctor arriving for an interview to join the asylum.

And it’s a nicely done, mostly fun but unsurprising set of small horror and thriller yarns. Director Baker livens things up with some nice shot set ups (such as when a taxi cab pulls up and is viewed from the other side of a big arch in the street) and some nice camera movement ideas. One is where, instead of just following the action down, for instance, when Charlotte Rampling goes to look for something in a drawer, he pans down and zooms simultaneously to take us right into the drawer from looking at her in the shot. 

He moves the camera quite a lot actually, and there are some nice moments where he uses it to highest effect. For example, when Morse and Cushing are locked in a struggle, the camera movements, while still smooth, are short twisty turning movements resembling something similar to a hand-held camera shot and throwing the chaos of movement into the scene to depict the feeling of the fight. And when Robert Powell slowly drifts upstairs to meet the patients, he stops to look at a fair few black and white engravings depicting scenes of mental illness through the ages... something which is enhanced by Baker’s continually roving camera panning up and around and sometimes spinning 360 degrees around in the frame as it takes in the content of the black and white engravings... or they might be etchings, come to think of it.

All in all, Asylum is nicely acted, written with a certain tongue in cheek feeling and has some nice music by Douglas Gamley, although there seems to be more ‘classical’ needle drop in this one than there is original composition, it has to be said. And, yeah, there are absolutely no surprises in this one and it can hardly be called all that scary, either but, the stories have a certain charm of their own... it’s well shot and I had fun with it. Not the best of the horror anthologies I’ve seen put out by Amicus but... it’s certainly not the worst of them either. A decent watch and Second Sight’s Blu Ray transfer is excellent, accompanied by some extras worth having although, I have to say, like a lot of this label’s releases, the price is a bit steep for what it is. I would have liked to have seen Indicator tackle the Amicus portmanteau horror movies in a more price friendly boxed collection, it has to be said. 

*Since watching and writing this, the great Severin Films have also relelased their own edition of the movie and, although I was tempted, I didn't double dip in this case. I did, however, buy their new pin badge based on the film which is a wonderfully crafted likeness of the Charles Gray manikin with a little front door which actually opens on the badge itself, revealing the grim, brainy matter inside the chest cavity. The height of fashion accessories for sure. 

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Dirty Cotton
Scoundrels

Uncle Tom’s Cabin
aka Onkel Toms Hütte
USA/West Germany/France/
Italy/Yugoslavia 1977
Directed by Géza von Radványi
and Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Wow... okay then. First of all, as you’ve probably guessed form the specs up the top, if you didn’t already know, that this movie is one of those bizarre Al Adamson re-purposed films that his company, IIP, used to foist onto the public as new product, following the latest trends and, somehow, managing to be quite successful for the most part. This time it’s the turn of a 1965 West German movie called Onkel Toms Hütte and based, of course, on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popular and somewhat influential (by the sound of it) novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Now, I don’t really approve of slavery as a thing and I also hate watching a lot of it in movies. I can tolerate stuff like Ben Hur because I know the lead protagonist removes himself from the equation to get his revenge but, as a rule, this trend of slaves working on cotton plantations is not something I can usually stomach and, truth be told, I tend to find these things really boring. Indeed, I only saw Tarantino’s Django Unchained once, when it was released into cinemas, because the whole second half of the movie is just such a tale. Honestly, the first half of that film was electric but when it reached a certain point, my brain kinda switched off. However, this one is part of the massive, 32 movie Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection box set from Severin which I’ve slowly been making my way through and, well, I really didn’t want to miss any of the films out.

The re-release of this film in this particular form comes about because of two things... the success of the plantation movie Mandingo, from two years prior and, more importantly, the success earlier in the year of the TV mini series Roots. IIP wanted something to capitalise on the success of that show and so they got hold of this movie but needed to really spice it up for audiences if they were going to make a success out of it.

Now then, the original version of the movie is almost three hours long. Here, Adamson has shot and added in a few scenes which lurk completely on the periphery of the plot in that way only he seems to be able to get away with... containing all the lurid content you will find in this movie totalling for, maybe as much of twenty minutes of it. However, bear in mind that, even with Adamson’s extra sex and torture footage added into the mix, the re-release only plays out for just over an hour and a half. So something in excess of an hour and a half has been excised from the original film’s running time.

Now, the film itself, the original, obviously jumps around a bit now but it basically tells of a nasty cotton farmer/slave trader called Legree (played here by Herbert Lom) and of the slave ‘Uncle’ Tom played by John Kitzmiller who, when he is close to death after one of many horrible crimes upon his people perpetrated by Legree, incites the slaves to run, burn down Legree’s big house and flood the cotton fields as they make their escape. And, from what I can see of it, despite the horrible subject matter, it’s a fairly engaging film and I could take it or leave it. Preferably leave it.

But then there’s Adamson’s scenes including a slave called Napoleon, who ties in with the West German footage only because he has the same name of a barely glimpsed character who jumps off a steamer and is suddenly played by a different actor, Prentiss Mouldon. Adamson regular, the lovely Marilyn Joi, also turns up in a pre-credits rape scene. And there’s some interesting things going on with the film in this version.

For example, sandwiched between the prologue and the opening credits, such as they are, is a load of footage from the film (including, I suspect, some of the excised bits) with screen loads of short, sharp blurb about the importance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel and it kind of makes a bizzare, mini trailer for the film you are about to watch...which I’ve never seen done before.

The other interesting thing about it is just how well Adamson works to blend his footage in with the original film. I mean, don’t get me wrong, once you know it’s extra footage inserted you can tell, for the most part, which are the additional scenes... and I suspect a siege on a monastery near the end of the picture may also be ‘Adamson enhanced’ because, for a minute there, it almost turns into a Western... yarhoooo! However, you can tell that Adamson’s really given it some thought here because he’s obviously studied what Radványi did in his version of the movie. For example, the whole movie, including Adamson’s sections, is based on a very pastel colour scheme which is almost exclusively browns. Everything looks like it’s brown or sepia almost, with no other really strong colours showing up too much. Another thing Adamson does, at least at the start of his scenes, is take a page from Radványi’s book in approaching things from a distance with long shots. Radványi uses a lot of master shots rather than reverting to close ups on his film and, although Adamson doesn’t eschew close ups like the former director, he does give it that kind of look in parts of his scenes to better match up, in visual style at least (certainly not tone), to the original footage. So, yeah, bearing in mind what he did with films like Horror Of The Blood Monsters (reviewed here) and Mean Mother (reviewed here), it’s really a step up for his approach on this one, I think.

All in all, though, I don’t have too much to say about Uncle Tom's Cabin. I’m not even once tempted to try and source the original 170 minute version to watch and I probably won’t ever revisit this version again. It’s not as bad an experience as I thought it would be, for sure but, I didn’t really have a good time with it and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, in all honesty. Interesting as another experiment in the way you can change films but, ultimately a chore to watch and I’m much more looking forward to the next couple in Severin’s mighty boxed edition.